Tuesday, 25 September 2007

When I read that PSAlive were to webcast the finals of the British Open 2007 for free, I quickly recovered from my strop at not being able to attend (thanks to Virgin Trains' exhorbitant fares - see this post) and eagerly logged on at 7.45pm.

The problem was, so did hundreds (thousands?) of others ...

I initially managed to hear some of the commentary, and also managed to log on to the live chat, which is an excellent idea that I didn't know was a feature of the service. Due to the over-running of the women's final, the men's did not start until aroun 8.30pm, and by this time I guessed a few people would have lost patience with the server problems.

All credit to the PSAlive team for offering the broadcast for free - a marketing idea that obviously proved too successful due to the terminal volume of traffic that tried to access the match.

Hopefully some of the visitors might be tempted to part with a few quid to access live events in the future or download archive matches.

Though the tournament lacked (probably) the best player in the world, it appears that it was very successful, with photos of the crowds at each round showed very encouraging attendance.

The progression of the players largely went to seeding, but this Open seemed to save the best till last, with Greg Gaultier's coming of age to take his biggest prize to date and Rachel Grinham's epic win over reigning champion Nicol David to take her third title.

I think that the fact that this match was free created the surge of interest, and credit to the organisers for making this concession in order to try and attract a wider audience.

I was just disappointed on the night, but look forward to trying the service again in the future.

I think the tech problems boil down to the fact that until viewers' internet access reaches a common level of minimum specification, streaming media is not a 100% reliable means of delivering coverage.